The use of animals to denote negative characteristics rises out of a long-standing reliance on the distinction – both strikingly dogmatic and strategically dynamic – between what is “human” and what is “animal”. One of the most influential texts to use animal imagery in conjuring up antipathy is the book of Revelation. Focusing on the female-animal assemblage of Revelation 17, I argue that in examining this assemblage more closely through Jacques Derrida’s notion of a deconstructed sovereignty, it is possible to destabilise facile connotations and connections between animals and an “other” beastliness that must be violently conquered.